Hi all! Let's talk today about Power Automate and Logic Apps products. Often, people do not understand what are the differences between these services and which of the services should be chosen to solve their problems. Let's figure it out.
Microsoft PowerAutomate
Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-based service that gives users the ability to create flows to automate time-consuming business tasks and processes. This service is intended for Citizen Developers - users who are not 100% developers, but involved in application development and process automation.
Microsoft Power Automate is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which additionally includes services such as Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents. This platform makes it easy to get all the necessary information from related Office 365 services and combine it in applications, data flows, reports, as well as auxiliary helper services.
Creating Power Automate flows is based on the concept of "trigger" => "set of actions". The flow starts on a certain trigger, which can be, for example, the creation of an item in a SharePoint list, the receipt of an email notification, or an HTTP request. After the start, the processing of actions that are configured in this thread begins. As actions, connectors to various services can be used. At the moment, Microsoft Power Automate supports more than 200 different third-party services and services from such giants as Google, Dropbox, Slack, WordPress, as well as various social services: Blogger, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and many others. Of course, in addition to this, integration with Office 365 applications is available. To simplify the use of Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft provides a large number of standard templates for various applications and events that we can use by simply filling in a set of required parameters. Also, users can create templates themselves in the constructor and publish them for use by other users.
Distinctive features of Microsoft Power Automate are:
- The presence of a large number of connectors to various third-party services.
- Support for integration with the services of Office 365 itself.
- The ability to launch flows on a specific trigger - for example, an integration scenario when, upon receiving a letter in a Gmail inbox, you need to initiate a series of actions in another service, for example, send a message to Teams and create an entry in a SharePoint list.
- The ability to debug streams, with detailed information about the state of the stream at each of its stages.
However, Microsoft Power Automate is a simplified version of the Logic Apps service. This means that when you create a Power Automate flow, a Logic Apps flow is created under the hood and handles the custom logic. Simply put, Power Automate uses the Logic Apps engine to implement flows.
Microsoft Power Automate is currently available as part of an Office 365 subscription, or as a separate plan purchased per user or per stream.
It is worth noting that premium connectors are only available when purchasing a separate plan. An Office 365 subscription does not provide premium connectors.
Logic apps
Logic Apps is a service that is part of Azure App Service. Azure Logic Apps is part of the Azure Integration Services platform, which includes the ability to access Azure APIs. Just like Power Automate, Logic Apps is a cloud-based service designed to automate business tasks and processes. However, while Microsoft Power Automate is focused on business process flows, Logic Apps is more focused on business logic blocks that are part of an end-to-end integration solution. Such decisions will require more careful management and control. One of the main differentiators of Logic Apps is the ability to specify how often the trigger is checked. There is no such setting in Power Automate.
For example, with Logic Apps, you can automate scenarios such as:
- Processing and forwarding orders to cloud services and local systems.
- Send email notifications using Office 365 when events occur in various systems, applications, and services.
- Move uploaded files from an FTP server to Azure Storage.
- Track social media posts on a specific topic and more.
Along with Microsoft Power Automate, Logic Apps allows you to create flows of various levels of complexity without writing code, but the pricing here is slightly different. Logic Apps takes a "pay as you go" approach. This means that you do not need to buy separate subscriptions and all connectors are available immediately. However, each execution of an action within a thread costs a certain amount of money.
When developing Logic Apps flows, keep in mind that the cost to run standard connectors and Enterprise connectors is different.
In the next article, we will see what other differences there are between Power Automate and Logic Apps services, as well as various interesting ways in which these two services interact.
Source: habr.com